An estimated 15,000 troops (American, Afghan, and NATO forces alike) are currently storming the city by foot, by tank and by air. The majority of Taliban forces active in Marja are thought to have fled the city before the commencement of military action on Friday, and figures from the US Marine corps estimate that the international coalition now controls over half of the city, although their grasp is relatively tenuous and major security challenges loom in the coming weeks.

So far, it seems we have only perhaps proven the obvious: Taliban forces, though resilient and well-schooled in guerrilla tactics, like Iraqi insurgents, are simply no match for U.S. Marines, NATO forces, and even the haphazard, inexperienced Afghan military when it comes to conventional 21^st-century style warfare. It seems the civilian cost of doing so, however, has been drastic, as twelve Afghans lost their lives today when two misfired NATO rockets struck near residential areas in the city.

We overestimate Taliban resurgence throughout Afghanistan (they number 1,000 in Marja, no match in numbers or technology to coalition resistance). Inarguably, their ranks have swelled over the last few years, but a lack of centralization and coordination amongst high-ranking officers in the organization and with their foot soldiers will prove highly detrimental to their efforts as U.S. and NATO troops continue phased deployment.

Afghanistan is a patchwork quilt of disparate polities, and must be approached and ruled as such (which certainly hasn’t been President Karzai’s approach). Stanley McChrystal’s new approach in this war, taking a page from David Petraeus’ largely successful ‘surge’ in Iraq, is beginning to work: limiting civilian casualties and coordinating efforts between troops and the locals builds confidence in flagging Afghan political and military institutions and establishes base conditions of social order necessary to stave off Al Qaeda influence in communities throughout the nation. Secrets from locals about Taliban bomb locations have likely already saved dozens of soldier’s lives in this weekend’s effort.

Coalition forces must continue to take the fight to the Taliban in strategically advantageous ways, utilizing the general population to gather intelligence and build support for the ruling regime (though backwards it may be). But tragic accidents like the rocket misfiring, though accidents they may be, have extremely damaging potential to diminish the renewed confidence the Afghan people are instilling in us, a confidence that could win this war that once seemed all but impossible.

BBC image of coalition undertaking in Helmand that commenced Friday.

In fact, it seems everyone is coming to terms with a Yanukovych victory, except the one person who really matters at this stage – Yulia Tymoshenko. Today Tymoshenko announced that she would challenge the election results, even though they have been deemed fair by international observers. Yanukovych told her to accept his 3 percent mandate and resign as prime minister.  As ludicrous as the proposition might seem, Yanukovych’s political advice for his opponent might hold some appeal.

Tymoshenko’s stubbornness stems, at least in part, from the difficult angle her campaign faced. As sitting Prime Minister during a recession, Yulia was forced to run as a candidate for change while maintaining her prominent role as an incumbent.

In the U.S. such a paradoxical position is standard operating procedure.  As political scientist Richard Fenno  observed, “Members of Congress run for Congress by running against congress.”

Tymoshenko’s bid essentially asked whether this principle could be applied in Ukraine. History suggested it could not. No Ukrainian president has ever been elected directly from the seat of Prime Minister, which meant Yanukovych clearly held the high ground as an opposition candidate. That the vote came down to such a narrow margin is a remarkable testiment to Tymoshenko’s well-run and well-fought campaign.

When Yanukovych takes office, Tymoshenko will likely be able to retain her position as prime minister. Her expulsion would require a vote of no confidence, which the Ukrainian parliament is too divided to make. Yet it’s clear the seat will continue to prove a double-edged sword for Tymoshenko, and it is little wonder she feels reluctance in returning to the position that handicapped her.

It would be foolish for Tymoshenko to heed Yanukovych’s advice and give up such a major position in parliament. For starters, it would destroy her constituency’s trust and discredit her opposition. But at the same time Tymoshenko needs to focus on turning her podium into a soap box. The best option for Ukraine – and Tymoshenko’s career – is if she stops being part of the problem and starts criticizing it.



This controversial move is in response to New Jersey’s failure to pass same-sex marriage through the legislature.

“No political party has a record good enough on LGBT civil rights that it can rightfully claim to be entitled to our money on a party-wide basis… No longer will we let any political party take our money and volunteers with one hand, and slap us in the face with the other when we seek full equality.” – Steven Goldstein, chair of Garden State Equality.

Garden State Equality will now only contribute money to individual candidates and organizations that support LGBT rights. But who really suffers from this – the parties, or NJ’s equality movement?

It is certainly understandable that groups like GSE are angered with NJ Democrats for voting against marriage equality. And the Democratic party is by no means the party of LGBT rights; it’s simply the best option the LGBT community has. But if the Democrats strengthen their support for recognition of same-sex relationships, and vote to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, it’ll be Garden State Equality that loses. They’ll have more money to spend on their preferred candidates, but they’ll lose their voice if they stop donating to the Democratic party. Contributions to individual candidates can only go so far. At the end of the day, most legislators (especially newer members) need to remain loyal to the party in order to succeed. And if that party is shunned by GSE, why should those legislators take GSE’s views into account?

It’s important to stand by your principles, and support only those who support you. But GSE is playing a risky game, and they’ve got a lot more to lose from this deal than the Democrats do. I honor their intentions, but I’m not sure this is the best way to affect change.

Immanuel Kant wrote Perpetual Peace in 1795, but interestingly enough, his thesis can already be called dead on arrival if one applies this “consensus” idea. Kant’s peace was between “republics” in the Enlightenment sense: that is, representative governments with legislative and executive separations of power, while universal suffrage went unmentioned. I would call Kant’s idea broadly representative of the Enlightenment consensus on democracy, which included the views of America’s founding fathers (who, like Kant, were careful to use the word “republic” to avoid the frightening prospect of mob rule they thought “democracy” with universal suffrage implied). During Kant’s lifetime, which societies most closely resembled this vision? Certainly the United States and Britain, whose political systems featured distinct legislative and executive power centers controlled by “voters” among an educated white male property-owning elite, who spoke the same language and were perhaps a few generations removed from picnicking together in Parliament Square. Yet by 1795, these two societies had already fought a bitter war against each other twenty years before and would fight another twenty years later. Anybody talking about a “democratic peace” back then would have been laughed out of the room.

However, how firm of a basis does DPT stand on? Jack rightly notes the corruption and authoritarianism of new democracies such as Russia and Pakistan disqualify them as evidence against DPT. But to apply such rigorous standards to “democracy” questions DPT’s claims to a long historical foundation. When did America become a “true” democracy? Before the Emancipation Proclamation? The Compromise of 1877? The Voting Rights Act? Did Britain become one before the Great Famine? The Sepoy Mutiny? The Scramble for Africa? The Tan War? Did France become one before the Algerian War? My point is not to denigrate the West or praise Putin and Nawaz Sharif. It is to emphasize the time which today’s democracies reached the stringent standards for consideration in DPT is relatively recent, no more than a century old, taking into account decolonization and desegregation, half that. How far we can generalize the last fifty or sixty years to our future?

For the past half century, there are many other factors which have contributed greatly to peace among democracies – the geopolitical alignment of democratic states against communism and now, perhaps, terrorism, the rise and supremacy of the democratic American “hyperpower,” the proliferation of nuclear arms, and a general decrease in warfare among all regime types. The evidence for DPT grows in the shadow of these equally important trends. Could DPT survive without the global American sheriff? Energy and resource scarcity? Democracies which vote for ethnic chauvinists or religious radicals? We may find that democratic peace theory is better labeled “Western Democratic Peace Theory,” “Democratic Superpower Peace Theory,” or perhaps most pessimistically, history will simply remember it as “The Period of Democratic Peace,” an interesting topic for future political science students’ senior theses. For now, at least, we should be thankful that as far as DPT is concerned, morality and history seem to march in step.

Liberal democracies did not go to war, and Fukuyama argued that this was the final level of self-perfection that international governments would ever have to endure. A massive, in collapsible economic trade network (which has failed to truly catch on in many developing countries) would, over time, ultimately unite the disparate ideological frontiers of the modern world into a cohesive whole.

Fukuyama’s theories have been largely disproven by the West’s (particularly America’s) export of democracy into seemingly infertile terrain. As Churchill acknowledged, democracy is the worst system besides everything that has already been tried, and in the Middle East and elsewhere, liberal political systems are not culturally tolerable or feasible given the massive challenge of establishing a functioning, competent bureaucracy (especially when facing grave security threats).

While today’s political climate does not constitute the end that Fukuyama probably envisioned, the Democratic peace theory has not been completely disarmed. The advent of effective IGO and NGO networks around the world has bolstered democratic ideals and strengthened the peace between many allied nations (especially in Europe and Latin America).

Some democracies do not lock horns. But then again, some do. India and Pakistan have been locked in a Cold War-esque stalemate since partition that seems to have no end in sight. Many International Affairs experts think Russian meddling in Ukraine is bound to lead to violence sooner or later, not to mention their brief occupation of Georgia in the summer of 2008.

Do these examples of conflict between “democratic” nations represent fundamental contradictions to the democratic peace theory?

Russia and Pakistan are often the subject of corruption scandals and allegations of non-democratic practices. Russia’s political system is essentially a centralized one-party democracy: a closed system with no tolerance for outsider candidates, and Putin seems to enjoy exercising power over bloc rivals at will. Georgia’s last election was plagued by ballot irregularities and there is still wide suspicion that President Mikhail Saakashvili and his allies tampered with results. While India’s bureaucracy is often overwhelmed by challenges of dire poverty and overpopulation, elections are conducted with relative stability and its stance toward Pakistan has cooled slightly.

In examining the actions of these democratic states (technically speaking), there is a direct connection between the level of freedom at home, and aggressiveness in foreign policy. Still, most interactions between democracies remain peaceful, leaving the democratic peace theory’s value intact.

Instant relevance, just add orange.

In the days following the famously narrow 2000 election between Bush and Gore, headline writers could come to only one conclusion: “Nader Loses.”

Today in Ukraine, the results were similarly inconclusive. Only one thing was certain — incumbent president Viktor Yushchenko had lost his seat, with a slim 5 percent of the vote.

Unsurprisingly, neither the former belle of the revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, nor Kuchma’s favored successor in 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, managed a simple majority. This means that next month Ukrainians will head back to the polls for a second round of voting.

Yanukovych beat Yulia in the first round, by a margin of nearly 17 percent. Tymoshenko has already accused Yanukovych of “monsterous fraud, beyond even what happened in 2004.” It sounds like hearkening back to the good old days. Most independent and EU observers have cautiously pronounced the results clean.

The competition is closer than first-round results indicate. As Kyiv Post noted, as the field narrows, Tymoshenko is likely to pick up many of the so-called orange votes that went to Yuschenko and others. What might be likely to thwart her is Yushchenko himself. He’s alleged that Tymoshenko and Yanucovych are both part of a Kremlin-controlled plot. If orange voters stay home, it will mean a Yanucovych victory. Yanucovych and Yushchenko both know this – as Taras Kuzio pointed out in the Eurasia Daily Monitor.

Is Yushchenko capable of Nadering Tymoschenko from the political afterlife? Will the loser of next month’s contest take the news gracefully? Is there a significant difference between the policy decisions we can expect between the two front runners? Ukrainians will answer these questions for themselves in next month’s second round.

The original Tea Partiers dressed as Indians and fooled nobody; today's "tea partiers" manage to fool themselves without costumes

If the rebels can take the precinct, the thinking goes, then the state and the national GOP (with its highbrow socialist “enablers”) are sure to follow.

Yet these people are still very much rebels without a cause. The Times article describes a movement that ranges from Ted Kaczynski-esque militiamen to desperate housewives looking for an outlet, but none have anything resembling a policy position. The Teapublican knows, more or less, what he’s against (“big government”, liberals, gays, Obama, Wall Street bailouts, taxes, abortion, the Mexicans, the Chinese, science, “world government”) and thanks to the power of the internet, he knows he’s not alone. But as of yet he doesn’t seem to know much else. Populist range and reactionary anger, feelings of economic anxiety and government betrayal are emotions, not ideas. The greatest irony in all this is that the tea partiers’ polar opposites in the Democratic Party are horrified by the unlettered hordes of right-wingers, but fall for much of the same hysteria themselves (picked up a Rolling Stone lately?). Of course, the bottom line is that zealots don’t win elections because they are by definition outside the mainstream. Tea Party poster child Doug Hoffman couldn’t win last November in a rural district with Leave it to Beaver demographics, and I would bet Michael Moore couldn’t command a majority in San Francisco. But it is the Republicans who have been far more explicit in pandering to their fringe set as part of a loyal “base,” and they seem sure to suffer the consequences.

Gay rights advocates at the 2009 National Equality March

At first glance, the debate is simple. Those in favor of same-sex marriage say it’s inevitable. Those against it say it’s not. But who really benefits from arguing for or against inevitability?

Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, claims that same-sex marriage has “always been inevitable.” This seems true, based on opinion polls that show young people to be much more in favor of gay rights than older generations. But does it help their cause to make this claim? I believe that emphasizing inevitability sends the message that LGBT rights will come eventually – and why should we fight tooth and nail for something we believe will happen no matter what? Gay rights advocates are still losing battles in liberal bastions like New Jersey and New York. And claiming that gay marriage is inevitable won’t make people fight any harder to achieve these rights now, in full, across the nation.

Perhaps when more states legalize gay marriage, it will be wise for groups like the HRC to emphasize the inevitability factor. They’ll have more proof for it, and they won’t have as much to lose as they do now. But at present time, only five states allow gay marriage, and four liberal-leaning states have rejected it in the last two years. Now is the time for the same-sex marriage movement to emphasize how far they still have to go and how hard they must fight, and put the inevitability issue to rest.

Why? Because the movement does not seek to depose the Supreme Leader but the President, Iran will remain an Islamic Republic. The protesters do not seek to undermine the government’s monopoly on force; they want more open Presidential elections to further socio-economic change. Concessions on elections and economic policy are the most optimistic outcomes for the Greens. They will not and wish not to create anything like a “Republic of Iran.” Even were Iranian elections to become more transparent and free, this would not challenge the primacy of the Supreme Leader in foreign policy and defense, nor the ideology of the Islamic Republic – the relevant factors in US-Iranian relations. If Mousavi became President and domestic reforms took place, the reformers would face significant pressure to follow nationalist Iranian policies to have legitimacy. To prevent conservative backlash and dispel fears that the Greens are Western tools, the Greens would be inclined to keep the hard-line on the Iranian nuclear program’s independence, which Khamenei has veto power over anyway.

Dan raises a good point that we do not seek to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program, and that reformists might be more open and compliant than Ahmadinejad, allowing compromise. However, we need not speculate how reformists might alter Iranian policy. The very reformist Khatami administration, from 1997-2005, coincided with the secret construction of the Natanz enrichment facility, the 2002 revelations about Iran’s nuclear program which triggered this crisis, and according to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, saw the most intense period of nuclear weapons research that continued until 2003. Now, even were we to attribute this to the Supreme Leader and IRGC, and not Khatami per se, this would not brighten prospects for reformist foreign policy now, as the reformists have little intention and dubious ability to unseat these bodies from their control of Iranian military and foreign policy. Regime change can alter some policy, and it certainly alters rhetoric, as Khatami’s case proved. However, major regime change does not seem likely, and Iranian history shows reforms are an unlikely catalyst for transparency, cooperation, and friendly intentions towards the US.